Tick Tock
by Nyah
Summary: Killian Jones, between the minutes, the memories, and the sheets.


**Now for a little context: **Takes place between asking asking him out and Hook deciding to get his hand back.

**Tick tock**

As I'm held fast in the depthless gaze of the author, I know there will be a day, years from now when all is well, that I think back to the time the clock started once again. I see it in those eyes—stringing out like an old sailor's yarn—sun-soaked hours awash in the familiar scent of my love on the breeze, dimmed only by the memory of a sound, measured and meaningful and wrong—a sound that drags me to the starting line like a gun going off.

Tick tock.

I suppose I am a bit surprised to see Henry, seated at the counter, head bowed over a book, not long after Emma has asked for a date, leaving me pleased, if bewildered, in her wake. It had been, by all appearances, quite the heroically brave effort on her part. I daresay, were she a character out of the classic literature of my youth, I'd have said she'd come with loins girded, prepared to do battle rather than ask me to supper. And perhaps it's thoughts of loins and battle that have me distracted enough to be surprised by the sight of the young man.

He's not at all surprised to see me, looking up just as I take note of him and inviting me over, man to man, with a nod of his head. "So you said 'yes,' obviously."

"Obviously," I reply with a grin at the good-natured tease. I take in the book in the boy's hands, the pages are thick with plain type, quite different from the book of fairytales or the books of cartoons he usually favors. "Still helping Regina out with her curse-breaking or did you just stick around to read me the riot act?"

"I don't know what that means so probably not."

Cheeky. Know how he comes by that, I do. "Just giving you an opening if you'd like to warn me off your mum. Seems like good form, what with you being the man in her life."

Henry closes his book and turns his seat to face me. "First of all, if you want a second date with my mom, you probably shouldn't think anything like that ever again. And definitely don't say it."

"A jest, mate."

Henry eyes me skeptically, a look I know well from the weeks he believed himself an ordinary boy and me half a raving lunatic. Albeit, one very well dressed.

It truly had been a jest. I'd crossed enough worlds to know good manners were purely a local phenomenon and the surest bet was to ask the lady what she wanted and pay attention to the answer. So. A date. I've no idea the origins of the term but some sense of what's expected: dinner, perhaps dancing, a chance to be more or less alone with her and, with any luck, more than less impressive.

And on that note…she likes me well enough, for certain. A man doesn't make it through three hundred odd years without learning to recognize a woman's interest. Yet, interest is but a passing fancy and easy enough to pique. A charming grin and bawdy tale are a sailor's stock and trade. Into port with a wink and out to sea with a smile and no consequences beyond the drink and the dance and the night.

That was the way of Captain Jones for a hundred years before Milah and nigh two hundred for Hook thereafter. And if those latter years saw a more fearsome grin and a deeper cup. Well, I daresay, for most, it added to the thrill.

Then, too, I was a man with a ship and a crew and a reputation across more than seven seas. I had…prospects, savory or not. And now? And now I was a rogue gone straight, a fair hand at a sword, and more or less no match for any one of my lady's enemies.

The price of dreamshade had been sharp and quick, robbing me of family and loyalty all at once. But the Neverland itself was a nightmare built entirely of magic and it's price has been my very self. Pan needed a mortal foe and so he created Captain Hook from Killian Jones.

But Pan is dead and I am awake.

Tick tock.

"What do you, you know, do now?" Henry asks, breaking into my thoughts like a conscience.

Indeed.

"No offense," he adds quickly. "But, like, my mom's the mayor and my grandpa has a pawn shop and… what does a pirate do outside of fairy tales? Stock market?"

"Remains to be seen. I was lucky enough to miss the curse that erased the memories of the people from my world but unlucky enough to miss out on the career advice."

"But you're going to stay, right? I know you're not trying to kill my grandpa anymore and I heard, you know, you left to be a pirate again when everyone got sent back to the Enchanted Forest." Henry says, tone gone suddenly serious, dropping nearer to the tones he'll carry as a man some day. "But if you make my mom care about you, you know you can't just leave, right?"

A jest dies on my lips. "Aye, lad, I know it." I bump his shoulder with my own, no hard feelings. "So you had a speech prepared to warn me off afterall."

Henry rolls his eyes so much like his mother I can't help but grin at the sight. "Dude, I'm the one who talked her into asking you out."

Something on my face must betray me because he adds, "Don't worry, she wanted to be talked into it."

I laugh. "Giving away all her secrets, are you? Shall I tell Swan there's a traitor in our midst?"

"No way! My moms both have enough enemies."

"Quite right."

That settled, Henry shoves his nose back into the novel he'd all but forgotten. He wears the shadow of a grin. "There is no teacher like the enemy."

My thoughts tilt as if on an axis. It's is exactly the sort of fable-born rubbish that might capture a boy's sensibilities. Quite ridiculous it is, to think the hard won lessons of life might be wrapped up in so neat a phrase. Something from a story, perhaps, and no matter of consequence.

And yet, I think of Peter Pan, an enemy more ancient even than the crocodile. To play a trick, to teach a lesson, was Pan's dearest game.

Tick tock.

The door to Granny's diner is still chiming and banging shut behind me as I remember, as if transported, Pan at his leisure—legs dangling from the socket of that ancient skull he'd called a lair.

"How long has it been since you came to Neverland, my dear, Captain Hook?"

I don't answer, clinging, as I am, for purchase on the lip of a cliff. Pan's taunts wash over my back, echoing out to sea. He tumbles from the giant's eye into the thick, hot air of a Neverland afternoon. It's the sort of air that makes a man lazy or mean. Or, as it were, a boy.

"What's it been, Hook?" Pan alights upon the spare earth just shy of my grasping fingers. We've played this game before, I note the position of the sun and anticipate the feral grin on his face, like a tiny, peevish god's. Had I thought this boy lovely once, thought him wondrous and fragile and lost? Had I truly thought him a boy at all?

"Come, don't' be like that? What's it been? A week, do you think? Perhaps as long as a month?"

It's been years, I am sure. Decades. "You jest. Surely it's been no longer than a pleasant afternoon." I wonder how long he'll wait before pressing his heel into my fingertips. Not long, I think. Perhaps a minute, perhaps a lifetime.

"Aha!" He crows with delight. "You've the right of it. Still, you should have learned by now, fairies are absolutely trustworthy, right up until they're not. Quite a bit like you, Captain—loyal to a fault right up until someone else dangles a better bait."

He draws a lazy circle with the toe of his boot in the dust around my clutching fingertips. The soft kidskin skims my hand here and there, the light touch like sandpaper to my alarmed nervous system. "A fairy is too small too hold more than one feeling at a time. All good or all bad, you see. Tink was cross with me and loved you, nose to toes, right up until you so rudely betrayed her. Now she loves me again and all is set to right. Or nearly."

He'd begun to drift away but spins back savagely now, as I knew he would, boots aiming for my good, vulnerable hand. But my hand is not there. Pan is not the only one with lessons to teach in Neverland. He's learned never to take his eyes off my hook. And so he doesn't see the knife gripped in my good hand until I've driven it through the toe of his boot.

He howls, going for his sword. But I've buried the dagger's point clean through Pan's boot and into the earth, with the added leverage, it's short work to curl my legs into the cliff face and propel myself backward, throwing my weight away from the cliff and into the drop. There are rocks below I've a fair chance of hitting, of course, as it's Pan's delight to wager what might be the cause of my death: broken neck, drowned by mermaids, eaten by a crocodile. And there may well be Never-beasts below but I've learned every rock on the island without once falling to my death.

And there is something else below, coming around the curve of the cove, as planned, just as the sun first touches the horizon. My ship. Whatever else I am, I am a sailor. I hit the water with perfect form and barely a sound.

Tick tock.

Seeking the crocodile is like flexing a limb that's fallen asleep and comes alive with sharp, sparkling jolts. He'd dogged my steps with a singularity of purpose for years once, never satisfied with just a hand. I understood. I, too, would settle for nothing less than his life.

But it's my own life I'm after now—the life I was bound for once before becoming cocooned in the that noxious bubble that is Neverland. Leaving the Neverland is always like waking up. In the stories, it is the place of children's sweetest imagining. For me it has always carried the rancid tang of a fever dream, the sort that clings well into the dawn hours and defies waking.

I push open the door to the shop. It's packed, as always with fragile oddments: jewelry and porcelain and playthings, arrayed to eerie effect like despairs on display. There are dusty photographs and butterflies under glass, their wings half gone to powder. I take a seat on a glass case with the dimensions of a coffin and I wait, ready to welcome the crocodile into his lair.

In the corner of my eye, the shop looms larger and I think I catch the sight of an ink and paper drawing. A plant. But I turn at the sound of the bell chiming and the spell is broken.

Tick tock.

In the stories, it is Pan who threw my hand to the crocodile. I know, I've read them all. The hand is lost before the story begins, cementing the enmity between pirate and boy, and Hook spends his life pursued by a dumb beast with a taste for human blood. As story telling devices go, it's unsubtle as a gun hanging above the stage. But still, effective. When you meet Hook, the clock starts, and you know how he meets his—my—end.

In reality, well. I suppose one could say Peter Pan set Rumplestiltskin and me in each other's paths as it was Pan who sent me out of Neverland—as was his wont from time to time—on pretense of some minor offence. Hunting the Neverbird that time, it seems to me. The truth is more petty and more complicated. The Lost Boys and the Pirates was the story of Neverland these many hundred years, the thrill that drew in little dreamers until their souls cared for nothing but Pan and his games. But a soldier is no pirate simply for changing the color of his flag.

Pan sent us pirating—I see that now—and we were happy to oblige. For no ship could sail the seas of the Neverland but my own Jolly Roger and a pirate is no pirate without loot to covet and ships to sink. So we were free, when the mood struck us, to glide in and out of the waking world. And so notorious were we that is was not long before the boys Pan recruited brought rumors of a fearsome ship plaguing the trade routes with sails like seraphim's wings and a captain who had a hook for a hand and sailed like a demon.

Neverland set me on the path to piracy as surely as it set Rumplestiltskin to dark magics. I myself was never one for more magic than absolutely necessary. I'd learned the cost too soon for its charms to have much sway.

But my crocodile is no dumb beast. Dumb beasts cannot be bribed or blackmailed. Nor do they keep trophies. But this crocodile had a taste for my blood long before he took my hand. And he's kept it as a trophy, Just as I thought.

He warns me against my own self, empty threats, I think, until they're not.

**Tick tock.**


End file.
